WIMTLC Side Scenes
by WallofIllusion
Summary: Scenes from my long MedusaxStein fic, "What it Means to Lose Control," that didn't make it into the main storyline. Expect updates to be highly erratic. Chapter 7: Editing. Happy Valentine's Day! Chapter 8: No Rest for the Weary, a prequel chapter.
1. Chapter 1

_What it Means to Lose Control_ (a twelve-chapter MedusaxStein fic, available from my profile) may be over, but I still have ideas for scenes from it. So I'll put those here. They will not necessarily all be MedusaxStein scenes; there might be some scenes from Marie's recovery, or some hurt-comfort scenes between Marie and Stein because those are fun and angsty. I know this is a pretty sloppy way to handle a fic, but guess what? I'm gonna do it anyway.

As for this first chapter: it was written as a response to the "Seduction Kiss" section of dA user Insanity-24-7's kiss meme. I literally wrote it _the day before_ I got volume 17 and learned that Stein had started smoking again, so... whatever.

* * *

"This is your brand… correct?"

"I don't smoke anymore." He quit, dammit. Months ago. So his heart shouldn't have pounded, his fingers shouldn't have twitched as Medusa put a cigarette to her lips and lit it. It should have been a simple matter to tear his eyes away, especially when she smiled with scorn in her eyes.

"I remember. You told Marie that if you could steel yourself and quit smoking, you'd be able to steel yourself and fight your own madness."

Her voice was rich with amusement, and Stein felt a piece of his willpower crumble. Yes, that was why he had to resist—or was it why he didn't have to resist anymore? He _was_ mad; he knew that, could feel it as his thoughts swirled wild and indistinct. And he liked smoking. Liked the feeling of hot air flooding his lungs. Liked the taste of fu cigarettes, and that was what Medusa was offering him. But—no. He couldn't. He wouldn't.

Medusa rolled her eyes and shook her head. "You've been fighting for far too long, Doctor. Here."

She inhaled, and then took the cigarette from her mouth and leaned towards him so that her lips met his. He could taste the smoke on her. And then her tongue nudged his lips open and the smoke flowed into his mouth and he sucked it down instinctively and—yes. His troublesome confusion dissolved, and she pulled back so he could exhale the smoke in a long, satisfied sigh.

"Let me guess." She tucked her cigarette between his lips and smiled when he began smoking it as if he'd never stopped. "Can't even remember why you quit now, can you?"


	2. Chapter 2

This one's also for the kiss meme; "Angry Kiss." It's from one of those times mentioned in chapter five when Stein tries to "interrupt" Medusa while she's working and gets Vector Plated back to his room as a result.

* * *

Medusa dissolved the Vector Plate just before she reached the doorway to Stein's room. Stein was crumpled against the far wall and looked up when he heard her, confusion and lust still tangled together in his eyes.

"Let me guess," Medusa said. "You tried to leave the room once or twice."

"…More than that, I think." His voice was slightly slurred. Which was hardly a surprise if the Plate had blasted him into the wall a few times.

"Pitiful," Medusa sneered. She crossed the room in two long strides, knelt by him, and tightly grasped the hair on the back of his head, tilting his face towards hers. And then she kissed him, ferociously, abusively; she clashed her teeth against his and bit his lips to bleeding, and just when he'd begun to think he was going to get what he wanted, she placed her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. She licked traces of his blood from her own lips as she stood and stared down at him. "Truly pitiful."


	3. Unraveling thoughts

This chapter's rated M for sexual content. Including some sadomasochism and dub-con(...?). ...Writing warnings for MedusaxStein fics always makes me feel like a horrible person...

* * *

Neither of them is thinking straight. He's trying to admit to himself—or trying not to admit to himself, he forgets which, he forgot long ago—that this is happening, that she's playing his body with a brutal grace and he wants her to. And there is a possessed light in her eyes as she holds him down by the throat and grinds against him, words spilling out of her:

"I want you, Stein, I want to be the itch beneath your skin, the image behind your eyelids, the pulse that beats in your blood and your mind—" Her mouth presses hot and hungry against his clavicle and her fingers pull too tight in his hair. He shudders—tries to catch his breath—opens red gashes in the skin of her back with his nails. She, too, has lost the distinction between pain and pleasure, so she only gasps and buries her face against his neck. "I want to rush through your veins and live in your bones, I want to be everything, Stein, your every last thought, _everything_…"

She means it; there is a desperation to her voice that gives her words an air of confession. Usually she does not speak of her own desires so much as mock and manipulate his, so this is a lapse in her self-control. She'll hate herself later for saying it, for _needing_.

"Narcissist," Stein whispers, a smile playing on his lips. His thoughts are not connected to the words; his insult is only based on the ghost memory of how he used to deal with her. He knows to strike when the enemy is weak. "You have no idea how to love anything but yourself."

Suddenly her teeth sink into his shoulder; suddenly vectors hold him down and Medusa does something with her hips that makes his mind go blank. He bucks towards her instinctively, and she moves again, this time eliciting a long groan in response. She leaves him no time to recover. She uses the physical to push away the mental, wielding his body against him as expertly as she does her own, and the screwed-up part of it is that he can't tell if he hates her for it. He can't tell, when he starts begging and saying her name over and over again, whether he wants her to stop or continue or just allow him a little autonomy, dammit—

But she _does_ stop then, and peels herself away and glares down at him. Her eyes are cold. Still bound, he is left breathing and needing and spun out of control. "Medusa…" he mumbles, aching, dignity be damned.

She reaches towards his face—but instead of stroking his cheek or lips she takes his screw and cranks it delicately in reverse. The grating echoes in his skull and he tenses and twitches and tries to catch the threads of his unraveling thoughts, but all he can do is look at Medusa with a fear that's not fully his own.

"Someday," she says, "you will learn that love means something different for people like you and me. It is jealous and painful, and you may be right to call it narcissistic. But trust me, I know exactly how to love."


	4. Contagious

I wanted to write something where Medusa was the vulnerable one for once.

* * *

She's in the mood to let him watch today.

So as she moves about her lab, boiling this, measuring that, he sits backwards in one of her chairs and watches. His eyes are wide and move loosely in their sockets as if they're not quite secured. They don't follow her exactly. And sometimes they drift to the floor, or to the ceiling, and she hears him muttering something.

"Hallucinating again?" she asks, to interrupt.

He gives a start and a shaky grin. Thanks her in the least sincere way possible. Settles his chin into his arms.

She sniffs and looks back at her work. The black blood is almost complete—almost, always almost. She is not unaware that she keeps moving the bar back and driving herself forward, but she cannot rest yet. Can't just abandon a project that she's worked on for centuries.

Slowly she becomes aware of a roar like the ocean in the back of her head. She hisses quietly in irritation. Stein hears.

"Something wrong?" he asks in mocking concern.

"Nothing."

But the roar is growing, swelling, and there's something black or maybe a deep red creeping at the edges of her vision. She puts down the beaker she's holding to rub her temples, to fight this off, but as she does the roar washes over her and her eyes roll back into her head. Inside her skull she sees a writhing mass of red and shadow, the distinctive three-eye pattern of the Kishin visible scattered among it, and she knows this is a hallucination but she can't shake it and the roaring has become screaming. Beyond the screaming she can hear her only her own heartbeat. It is rushing along too fast, too loud, because she is terrified as she feels something sludgy drip down the back of her neck, through her clothes, down her body. The floor, too, is made of the same sludge and feels suddenly unstable. Surely she will be sucked down and away—

And then she feels a sharp fire on her shoulder and an arm around her back. Her vision clears. The only thing dripping down her skin is the sheen of sweat on her forehead and neck, and the blood on her shoulder where Stein slashed her with his scalpel like pinching a sleepwalker. Her heart is still racing. Stein is holding her to his chest. As her breathing returns to normal, she lets herself touch his shirt and rest her forehead against him. She moves her hand tenderly along his chest with a quiet, self-mocking laugh.

"I shouldn't let you stay here," she whispers. "You're contagious."

His laugh sounds so much like hers. He tosses the scalpel aside and strokes her hair with his now-free hand. "Stupid witch," he says, hate-filled and affectionate. "It's your own damn fault."


	5. Handiwork

'Member this?  
_Once he cut across her chest deeply enough that it did not stop bleeding right away, and he offered to stitch it up._  
_"It'll scar," he warned, as if she couldn't have deduced that from his own appearance. Nevertheless she lay down across one of her operating tables, breathing calmly as his needle went in and out of her skin. There was a kind of intimacy to it. When it scarred, it would be a permanent reminder that he could be gentle with her. _(From chapter 5)_  
_

Good, 'cause that's what this is about. This one's particularly explicit with a focus on masochism. _  
_

* * *

He pulls his pants on and she wraps herself in his coat—gingerly, so that she doesn't get too much blood on it from the gash on her chest—and together they move from her bedroom to her operating room. She points out her sutures to him and sits down on the operating table, shedding his coat to the floor. When she lies backwards, she shivers, the metal uncomfortably cool against her skin.

The first thing he does is disinfect. She almost protests—not to the stinging, she couldn't care less about that, but to his careful treatment. She wants to mock him, tease him, _honestly do you care about my health that much?_, but one glance at his face tells her that it isn't necessarily about her right now. This is just the first step of a process he has carried out many times. A frown twitches at her lips.

"Stein," she says quietly.

His eyes run briefly over her face, reading her silent complaint. He smiles unkindly and presses his thumb to the edge of the cut. It aches and new blood oozes out; Medusa's fingers tense and curl, not entirely in displeasure.

"Sometimes, things just aren't about you," he tells her, and he gets to work.

He isn't rough, but he isn't exactly gentle, either. There's no compassionate concern over whether or not he's hurting her; his normal sadism is dormant as well. She almost wonders if she's just a hunk of flesh to him now—something he has to look at with a doctor's impersonal eye—except that she can feel arousal and tension in the air. His composure is no more real than it ever is.

Every time he pushes the needle in, Medusa feels the sting echo in her spine, and she has to focus to keep her back from arching. It's making her dizzy, the piercing and the slight friction of the sutures pulling through and Stein's hand manipulating her breasts but only to adjust his working surface, and keeping her breath level takes effort.

When he pulls one of the stitches tight, a tiny sound emerges from her throat, and she can feel the change in the air as Stein hears it. His idle hand wanders for a moment, down over her ribs, her stomach, further—she pushes it hand away.

"Finish with the stitches first," she says. The breathiness of her own voice surprises her. "How very unprofessio—nn—…"

His hand takes the same path back upwards, and this time she can't keep from moving in response. She struggles to keep her head clear. Oh, she'll pull him down soon enough but this really needs to be finished first, just for rationality's sake—

Their breaths are similarly ragged as he gets back to work, and Medusa finds it harder and harder to remain still. She does not _squirm_—she would never squirm, she has more control than that—but she can feel the contractions of her muscles that could lead to less dignified movements. If Stein is even half the doctor he claims to be then he must notice them too.

Finally he puts the needle aside and strokes the stitches with his finger. She tries to reach for him then—but he pushes her arm away and drops his lips to the closed wound. His boldness surprises a gasp out of her as he begins to suck, _hard_, his tongue tracing the stitches. Pain shoots through Medusa like electricity from a snapped wire, edges tinged with pleasure. She breathes heavily for a moment, and then gives a laugh that is not as cold as she intends it to be. "Who's the narcissist now?" she asks, turning his one-time insult against him. "At least I don't make out with my own handiwo—"

She is cut short when he bites down suddenly on the wound, the pain like liquid fire this time, and her eyes squeeze shut of their own accord. When she opens them again, he's staring at her with an almost-hidden smirk on his face.

"If it bothers you, I could stop."

"If you stop, you'll be the next one needing stitches," is Medusa's answer. She makes an attempt to sit up, but he pushes her down by the shoulder and before she can move again his mouth is upon hers. The tang of her blood is on his tongue. She cannot stop herself from moaning softly. She is no naïve maiden melting in a lover's embrace, but she _can't fight this_—

—And yet, she is not distracted enough to ignore the way Stein guides her arms up over her head and pins them there in one hand. She makes an indignant noise and breaks the kiss, bending her leg in case she needs to kick him away. "Stein," she says, threat absent from her voice because she hasn't the breath to growl, "if you think that—"

"Relax," he interrupts firmly, and he trails his free hand over the cut again, then over her stomach, her mound, and up her inner thigh. Distracting shivers of pleasure move up and down her spine, and when Stein presses down on her knee, she lowers her leg without resisting. For a moment, she cannot think; he is nibbling at the wound again, and she knows that this is not a liberty she would normally allow him but she can't for anything remember why. There is something breathtaking about how he's teasing when not an hour ago he was trying to kill her.

After a minute, he leaves off with the wound and moves to whisper in her ear.

"You want to fight back, don't you? You want to resist, get into control of the situation, but at the same time…" He touches his tongue to the edge of her ear before continuing. "You don't, because you're enjoying this more than you ever would have expected to. There's nothing quite like this, is there? The rush of putting yourself, your _pleasure_, in the hands of someone who'd just as soon tear you limb from limb as fuck you. And you know that you're the one at a disadvantage, so you force yourself to stay alert, which only makes every sensation that much more intense…"

She can think of no words of denial as he climbs onto the table and straddles her, the cloth of his pants rough against her bare skin. Her only option, then, is to attack: "I'm sure you'd know, wouldn't you?"

He laughs softly, not in amusement, and bites her ear. And then he does it again, harder, and then harder still, and with a jolt it occurs to her—

"It occurs to you that there's nothing stopping me from biting clean through," he says, still close enough for teeth to brush skin, "and then what would you do?"

"I'd stitch it back on," Medusa replies without hesitation.

"If I swallowed it?"

"Then I'd take a piece of your ear as replacement."

He laughs again, and this time there is amusement in it, and an edge of madness. Medusa frowns.

"That wasn't a joke."

But he keeps laughing, and he sits up, releasing her arms to clutch his sides. "It _is_ a joke, though. That was a joke, _we're_ a joke, far too sick for anyone to take seriously—ahaha—"

She sits up, too, and presses her lips to his firmly, smothering his laughter until he moans into her mouth instead. Then she pulls back to look him in the eye.

"_Focus_, love," she tells him.

There is uncertainty in his face. "This shouldn't work," he protests. "We shouldn't work."

"Who cares about 'should'? I'm only interested in what _is_."

His head twitches slightly in a nod. Then there is a quiet moment as they contemplate their situation: each has a hand on the other's chest, and there is enough room to fall back in either direction. It would require little effort for Medusa to take over here, to use him roughly and show him what a fool he was to have tried to lord over her. But while she is wondering why this does not immediately appeal to her, he gives her a light, experimental push. Her eyes lock on to his. "Relax," he says again, softly, and only when Medusa realizes that there is no resentment in her gaze does she allows herself to be maneuvered backwards so that Stein is on top of her once more. He kisses her, then, with something that she would have mistaken for sincerity if she were stupid, and she makes herself a thousand promises about how it's only this once, never again, and she'll show him later that he has no right to her.

But by the time his lips leave hers to trail down her neck, she has forgotten them all.


	6. A Matter of Names

After two weeks, she decided that she had the right to use his first name. She didn't expect him to appreciate such a sign of intimacy, necessarily; he still rarely called her by name, and never with affection, just in desperate rage when his sanity visited him or in panic _Medusa please, please_ when he thought she really was going to kill him. Instead he called her _witch_ or, more often, nothing at all, as if trying to forget whose control he was under.

Thus far, she had called him _Stein_ or _Doctor_. The latter reminded him of his affinity for cutting people up, and its formality emphasized the irony that she knew pained him—that he, so brilliant, had fallen into her hands, and that she could be so polite while robbing him of every last bit of dignity he had. But to call him by his first name would be to take a new liberty, to invade a new level of intimacy that not even his colleagues touched.

To the best of Medusa's knowledge, there was only one person who ever called him by his given name, and that was all the more reason for her to claim this right.

So one night, before dinner, she went to the corner of her lab that she'd granted to him and stroked his hair gently to make sure his eyes were on the real world. "It's time to eat, Franken."

She couldn't jump backwards in time. In an instant, he'd caught her by the neck and shoved her down against the table.

"You don't get to call me that."

She pried his fingers loose and then pushed him away with her tail, rubbing her throat as she straightened. "I will call you anything I want," she said, eyes narrowed.

"Not that."

"Try to stop me."

"Easy." Malice gleamed in his eyes. "You don't want me thinking of her every time you say my name."

Her tail flew at him and stopped just short of his throat, but he didn't even flinch. A crooked smirk spread across his face. "If that's not true, then you're right. I've got no way to stop you."

She did not lower her tail. "I could kill you like this, you know. _Franken_."

But he was right; the word soured in her mouth like bile. She had the sudden, fierce, utterly mad urge to slice off his head and watch his body slump over—

"You could. But then I'd die with her name on my lips."

A shudder passed through her, and the violent urge flared again, and with it or contrary to it came the urge to push him down, wrap around him, seal off his lips with hers, remind him that _she_ and no one else owned him. But she was not thinking rationally. He was close to besting her here, and if she lost her composure then victory would be his.

She turned her gaze cold and lowered her tail. "I'll make you forget about her."

"Not by using my first name, you won't," he chuckled.

Medusa strode past him towards the library's entrance. She could hear Stein following behind her, but once she'd gotten out the door she closed it behind her and locked it.

"…Supper?" came Stein's voice after a moment, slightly muffled by the heavy door.

"Not tonight, Doctor Stein," she replied, and went to eat alone.


	7. Editing

He is learning to edit his memory. It is a painful process because it requires that he focus only on the bad times, the times when Medusa was cruel, scornful, when she robbed him of sanity and choice and anything she couldn't control. Those times certainly existed. But just as certainly, there had been moments when some strange peace had infiltrated both of them at once and they'd indulged, if only for a few seconds, in the delusion that they loved each other.

The first time he saw her naked. She shed her clothes and then stood before him and let his eyes travel over her—up over her lean legs, the dark untamed hair between them, the light definition of her abdomen muscles that spoke to her agility and strength, the simple but unabashed curve of her breasts. The sight of her body awoke a mad animal lust that made his head spin; and yet beneath that, even the quiet, desperate voice of his sanity was momentarily awed into silence at the perfection of the specimen he beheld. When his eyes returned to her face, she smiled lazily, knowing his every thought.

The time he matched his wavelength to hers, on impulse—more to see if he could than any other reason. She shivered at the sudden, unfamiliar intimacy and turned a sharp glare towards him. But he could feel wonder in her soul, and pleasure. He cracked a smile at her. And in a moment, she grew used to the sensation and she, too, slipped into a nervous smile. Never before had he felt so at home with someone else's soul.

The time he'd found her slumped over her work in a light doze, her breath peaceful, an empty test tube dangling precariously from her fingers. It had taken him a moment to identify the strange emotion that the sight prompted in him. But when he did, he slipped the test tube from her grasp and placed it into the rack in front of her and then smirked, half-mocking himself.

"I pity you," he said under his breath to the woman who had dragged him to his own willing ruin. His voice was not without affection. "Because you've made the mistake of caring. I could be broken by anyone with enough of your traits, but you're in the oh-so-awkward position of really caring about _me_."

He is trying to forget all of these things. It does him no good to remember.

During the day, when Marie is gone and Medusa is whispering into his mind like a wicked lover, he sometimes has to bite his tongue and pray that she can't read his thoughts because the question is clawing at his throat and beating on the inside of his skull: _was any of that sincere?_ Even knowing that her answer would be coy (he can almost hear her say _come back to me and find out_), it is hard to swallow his curiosity. Even knowing that her answer could drag him back to the hell she'd built for him. Sometimes he thinks he wouldn't mind being dragged back if it would mean living under her gaze again, where a single flick of her eyes could still the screaming inside him or make it consume him. Where he was allowed to feel his own power without fearing himself.

He _has_ to forget these things.

He has to forget what happened when his voice—a mere whisper though it had been—had woken her, and she'd caught his arm before he could turn away. Her eyes were still heavy with sleep, but they were amused and certain. "Why should I be pitied?" she had asked. Her voice was as soft as his, but instead of his dry sarcasm it was warm and rich and welcoming. "I have what I want."

Someday, maybe, when he's got his head on straight again, he'll be allowed to remember that and shudder at the thought of her ownership. For now, it's just one more memory to be edited away.


	8. No Rest for the Weary

They all turned to shuffle out, but Lord Death called only Stein back.

"Could you stay a minute? There's something I'd like to discuss with you."

Marie looked at him in concern. But Stein's eyes slid over to Spirit on instinct; Spirit wasn't quite looking at him, but he didn't seem to be worried. He didn't have that shamed dog look to him that he sometimes did. So, Stein concluded, perhaps there wasn't a problem. He gave a little smile and wave to Marie, and to Maka who had looked back as well, and waited for everyone to leave and Lord Death to speak.

"It's good to have you back, Stein," he said at last. "We were hard-pressed without you. Especially since we lost Justin as well…"

Stein bowed his head. "Yes. I'd hoped we could apprehend him, but…"

"Well, you know. He's a deathscythe too. He's no pushover."

No, Stein supposed he wasn't. But he and Marie had _almost_ managed, and it wasn't Justin's deathscythe ability that had stopped them.

"Is that what you wanted to say?" he asked politely. It wasn't, obviously, but this was the best way to prompt Lord Death to get to the point.

"No, that's not it. Honestly, I have a bit of bad news, and I thought you might prefer to hear this in private." He fixed Stein with a stare from behind his mask. "Medusa is back."

Stein froze. A chill danced across his back, the kind of chill he felt sometimes when she spoke to him. But that was only a hallucination. To hear that she was _really_ still alive—

"Are you sure?"

"As sure as sure can be!" Lord Death answered. "It's a long story, but she was the one who led our offense against Arachne. She was pretty quick to dissolve the partnership upon success, though. By attacking Maka."

Stein was having trouble breathing. Without realizing, he raised his hand to his screw and twisted it absently. "I _killed_ her." He was sure of it. He'd stuck a scythe through her damned skull. She may have confused his thought processes somewhat, but not _that_ badly; he remembered the crunch of her cranial bone.

"Yes, well." Lord Death shrugged. "You know how witches are. As I'm sure you've noticed, Medusa is _particularly_ prone to doing whatever it takes to have her way. She hijacked a little girl's body for a little while, but when Arachne died she took over her sister's body."

Stein catalogued this information (she would have black hair now—but that didn't matter) and tried to still the shaking of his hands, looking towards Lord Death. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Wellll…" Lord Death leaned to the side. "Truth be told, I'd rather not let her just do whatever she wants. I've had about enough of that. I need someone to get rid of her. And I thought, since you've already taken her down once…"

"_Mostly_ taken her down," Stein muttered.

Lord Death shrugged. "Better than anyone else has managed. I thought you might want to give it another shot."

Stein felt a smirk tug at his lips. Oh, yes. He certainly wanted to. He was not as horrified as he might have been to hear that the witch was still alive. More than that, he was angry that she'd dared to take his victory away from him. He'd killed her (and felt triumph tingle through his limbs like champagne), and if she didn't have the sense to stay dead, he would be _viciously_ glad to do it again.

But he remembered, too, the feeling of her breath on his ear: at the dance, and then after it only in his mind. Remembered how his thoughts of rebellion had taken her shape and tempted him. Remembered a desire that shame and Marie's soft wavelength could not push away. Spirit had known—had seen it in him during the fight. Spirit must have told Lord Death. And so Lord Death must have known that lurking behind Stein's urge to kill Medusa again was the infinitely more dangerous longing to simply _see_ her again.

"I could send Spartoi," Lord Death was saying. "Not Maka, of course, since Medusa seems to be itching to kill her, but some of the others. But they just don't have the experience that you do."

General experience, or the experience of beating back her vectors in the desperate, exhilarating fight to lay a scratch on her? She was a challenge. She was the most fun he'd had fighting in a long time, more so than Justin, much more so than the occasional piddling assignment Lord Death sent him out on. He twisted his screw again until it clicked into place. His fingers still remembered the satisfying _thunk_ of driving Spirit through her skull.

"Stein?"

Stein gave a little jump and, with difficulty, focused his gaze on Lord Death's mask. He was getting too lost in thought. He was getting carried away.

"…May I have a little time to think about it?" he asked.

"Mm-hmm!" Lord Death answered at once with a nod. "Not too long, though. Azusa's got a location for her now, but she could move at any time."

"Understood. I'll let you know by tomorrow morning."

**x**

Back at home, Marie made dinner. Stein had tried to tell her that she didn't have to— that they could order delivery— but the look on her face was enough to cut off that train of thought.

"I have had enough cheap delivery to last me the rest of the year. I'm going to make some _real_ food."

"Can I help?"

"Only if you really want to. If you don't, you have to sit down and relax." She thought for a moment. "Or do some experiments, whatever you want to do. We're home, Franken. We can relax now."

With a deep breath, he let himself know that she was right. The world was still going mad, and the witch behind the whole mess wasn't dead after all, but they were home, and for tonight, at least, they could let themselves rest.

Even so, as Marie headed out the door with a grocery list in hand, Stein found his mind wandering back to Lord Death's request. He imagined Medusa's face, lined with dark hair rather than light, her eyes still as mocking as ever. She smiled her carnivore's smile, and when the words _Come play with me again_ echoed in his mind, he knew they were his own imagination. That didn't make them any less tempting. He could still feel in his gut the satisfaction of killing her, the purity of slicing through her body and then her skull. He wanted that again. He wanted to best her again.

And yet he never tried to kill his hallucinations of her.

They hadn't been as complex recently; spending so much time with Marie had calmed his mind in more ways than one. But the potential for them was still inside him, entwined with his madness. Waiting for him to lower his guard so that she could tempt him and drag him to hell.

**x**

"What's bothering you?" Marie asked once the pork was in the oven.

Stein grunted. "Something Lord Death said."

"Before the rest of us left, or after?"

"After."

Marie pulled off her pink (mauve was the word she used) oven mitts and hung them on a ring stand. "Tell me about it?" she proposed.

Stein sighed. He would have to eventually, wouldn't he? If he was going to hunt that snake witch, Lord Death would know better than to send him alone. Marie would be the perfect counterbalance to what she offered. _More perfect now than ever_, said a particularly sardonic part of his mind. _Everything emotional, everything _physical_ that you could want from Medusa, you have in Marie._ It wasn't true, though, not even after the recent developments in their relationship. Marie was a different creature entirely from Medusa. Better, in many ways. But she didn't make his stomach turn over like the witch did.

Marie was watching him. Her cheeks were a bit pink. "You didn't tell him about us, did you?"

Stein frowned. "Of course not. That's not what he asked about."

"Oh." She turned even redder. "Good."

"Medusa's still alive," he said.

Her eye widened and her mouth dropped halfway open. "No."

"Apparently she worked with the DWMA to defeat Arachnophobia, but now she's after Maka."

"Why Maka?"

"Soul Perception."

There wasn't a gentle way to put it. Marie paled, and Stein knew that it was anger rather than fear that was making her hands shake. "We can't let her near Maka."

"No," Stein agreed. "Lord Death says Azusa has a location for her. He wants to launch attack against her ASAP."

"Who's leading it?" He stared at her until realization dawned on her face. "You?"

"I've killed her once before," Stein pointed out.

"But you need a break! We both need a break, we've been…"

"Dodging Lord Death's justice?" Stein suggested. "He's not really required to let us sit on our asses after that."

"Was he angry after all then?" Marie asked.

Stein waved his hand in dismissal. "No. There's simply a strong possibility that we're the best candidates for the job."

"…All right then." Marie wiped her hands on a tea towel idly. "What are you thinking so hard about?"

"He offered to send Spartoi instead."

Marie frowned. He'd known she would. She knew the students were strong, yes, but she still hated to see them sent into danger. Perhaps that was a motherly instinct. Or maybe it was just the way her mind worked.

"I told him I'd have an answer for him by tomorrow."

"Do you not want to do it?"

Stein sighed. "I wouldn't mind the chance to rest, but I'm not sure about sending Spartoi after them."

"Yes." Marie shivered. "Especially Maka."

He wouldn't send Maka. Stein believed that much. But none of the students had the subtlety it took to oppose Medusa and her schemes. She had to be handled without any inkling of mercy. It would take more than a sense of duty to tear her apart; it would take real _desire_.

"I want to do it," he said, surprising himself. He wasn't surprised to discover that he wanted to— the desire had been preying on him since Lord Death's first announcement; more that he felt able to say it so confidently even as his sanity tried to shove the thoughts under the rug. Maybe Marie's wavelength was doing too much for him. There were some things that he should still feel shame for. He stumbled over his words, looking for an excuse to feel so conflicted. "I don't want to drag you into something new if you need to rest, though."

A little smile appeared on her face, and she pressed her fist into her chest in a sort of salute. "I _am_ a deathscythe, you know! If duty calls, I'm there."

"Of course."

Stein's stomach turned. It was fear, wasn't it? It had to be. Fear because his one possible excuse was looking at him and smiling, not being an excuse at all. He couldn't be eager. He refused to be eager.

The memory again of Spirit slicing clean through her torso and her blood seeping into his skin, and a shiver deep within his body.

"Very well," he said, his mouth moving on its own. "I'll tell Lord Death in the morning. We'll probably head out in a few days."


End file.
